macnn
04/29/2008, 11:30am, EDT
Tuesday, April 29th
AT&T intros hard-of-hearing plan for iPhone
The iPhone is now eligible for AT&T's Text Accessibility Plan, the company has announced. The TAP package is intended for deaf or hard-of-hearing customers, as a substitute for the phone's normal voice bundles. Customers are instead presented with unlimited SMS messaging, along with the iPhone's typical unlimited e-mail and web browsing. Visual Voicemail remains present, and voice calls can still be dialed out, albeit at a charge of $0.40 per minute.
The plan costs $40 per month; to qualify, customers must first subscribe to a regular iPhone data plan, and then submit an application to AT&T's National Center for Customers With Disabilities (NCCD). Once a person is accepted, TAP then replaces the normal iPhone rates.
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Too bad
I wish this plan was generally available. I rarely use a phone for voice calls, but I'm not hard of hearing. (I just prefer email, SMS, and texts.)
Interesting
This concept is all too familiar in the developing world, where vast majority of phones are pre-paid (pay-as-you-go), and airtime outgoing minutes are beyond reach for many. SMS is significantly cheaper and cellphone is used for incoming calls and SMS only (incoming airtime is always free). There is even a technique (back home they call it 'pulling', as in 'pull me on the cell'); if there are no funds on the phone, or user is extremely low, they call the other party, let it ring once (for ID to display), then hang up. That way, they don't pay for the call.Having said that, in the developed world, talking is faster and more efficient than typing (and let's not even begin to talk about SMSing on a numeric keypad). I can't imagine a reason why I would prefer to text/e-mail/SMS someone instead of calling them and saying the same thing in 1/10th of the time it took to type it. Other than rare occasions when discretion may be required, whenever someone sends me SMS, or tries to chat on iChat/Skype, I pick up a phone. I can touch-type up to 60 words per minute; I can say four times as many. I'm sure there may be people out there who would be interested in voiceless plan, but the numbers are most likely negligible.
Can't see first poster
The new forums seem to have a problem. For some reason, I can no longer see the first post. It appears very briefly, then collapses and vanishes from the page without a way to expand/open/find it.Another issue is with displaying an ampersand. Whenever we mention the exclusive iPod wireless carrier (ATT), the message is truncated after the ampersand, like so: AT
texting
texting is useful when you don't want to get roped into a long phone call, just pass a quick message to the receiver. Other times the receiver may not be available to talk on the phone (at a theater for instance or in a meeting or lecture hall). Texting works well when one or the other is in a noisy environment. I can't imagine communicating nearly exclusively by SMS, though.
this is backwrds
You shouldn't have to sign up for an expensive 2-year voice data plan, then hope that ATT permits you to downgrade to a data-only plan. [reposted due to error with form processing of ampersand].
...the headline tag line...I thought, boy, I heard people complain about the low volume ringer
generally available
I wonder how many they could sell if they made the plan available to anyone. So basically you'd have an iPod touch with the added abiliy to check email and web browse when you weren't within range of a free wi-fi hot spot. I'm not sure I'd be willing to spend $40/month on something like that. But I can say with certainty that I will never switch back to ATT for my voice cell phone needs.